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(from The Gulls’ Sweetly Banked Flight)
In Brooklyn, borough of churches
and young men in undershirts,
I found her sending spiritual runners
over the sidewalks seeking the crevice
that would open the city to her,
and my feet, too, felt the throb
of the familiar terrain.
At night, she murmurs,
sleep, make love, smoke cigarettes,
her words whispered warm against my cheek,
her arms tight around my back,
the red glow from our fingers
stabbing the anarchic night at our window
to light the way to the street below
electric with adolescent obscenities,
Hey, Jesús, up yours, you mutha!
voices swallowed in the roar of trucks
and the rumble of the F train
beneath Smith Street.
We call out the window for Jesús,
the little street kid, the recylcer of hubcaps,
whom we imagine a wine bearer whose goblets
gather the sounds of the street
into a reification of that startling life
so near to our quiet bed,
a metaphor we can bend to our wishes,
knowing that its taut spring
will snap us together,
unresisting prisoners of the pulse
that sets the early summer stillness
into subtle movements
that rock the street to sleep
at dawn’s edge.